TCO, The Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees, supports professionals in Sweden by advocating for fair work conditions, better wages, and career growth. They represent members' voices in societal matters, contributing to improved working environments.

Through advertising agency FWD, I created three educational videos for their client TCO. The films are about collective work agreements, work environment and the history of TCO and are aimed at elected representatives and members of the unions that are part of TCO.

My role in this project was to design and create the style, produce all visual content and animate the videos, from storyboard to finished product.

For the character design I wanted to work with unique skin tones, simple facial features and notable noses, loosely inspired by the 90s sitcom Doug. I started with the two recurring characters Aris and Minna who I wanted to have clear silhouettes; one tall and slim and one short and curvy, and then built the environment around them and their shapes.

Since there are no real dialogues between the characters, only reactions to the narrator, I enhanced the eyebrows and removed the eyes for a clean yet expressive look. A big thing in these films is the diversity, all characters are built in different body shapes and heights and I ended up designing and using over 70 characters, mains and extras, across the project.

As the films are quite character-heavy and long, much like animated shorts rather than typical explainer videos, I took the opportunity to try something different and incorporate a few classic film techniques to keep it a bit more interesting. This includes cutting the scenes, using close-ups of reactions and so on, instead of relying solely on the usual transitions and panning which are common in explainer videos.

For the finishing look I worked in a lower framerate, used textures to get a boiling effect and scatter up the edges, giving the sharp vectors a soft, hand-made and friendly vibe.